Sublime

Hill spent hours determining where best to invest—and when—in steel trestles to replace wooden ones and masonry culverts to replace earlier wooden ones. He stopped often to talk to the gangs of track layers and the graders carving at the earth with their horse-drawn blades. Soon, he had all locomotives using coal for fuel and then set about acquiri

Jim Hill worked incessantly at improving every aspect of the railroad’s structure and operation. He traveled back and forth along the line in his business car, looking for dips and bumps and spying out curves that could be straightened and grades that could be lessened. More than any other railroad leader of the day, he had an engineer’s passion fo

The SP&S proved to be the superb line that Jim Hill had promised; in fact, it was the best road he had ever built.

Few regional railroads could match it either for solidity of capitalization and infrastructure or for excellence of management.

Much more important, his philosophy of railroading—with its emphasis on infrastructure and the primacy of freight—would live on, not only in these lines but in most others as well.

Stephens was the president of the railroad, which was a wholly American-owned stock company with its main office in the old Tontine Building on Wall Street. The capitalization was a million dollars.

The “Q” was truly one of America’s best and most-profitable roads. Well capitalized, well constructed, and well managed by two of the giant figures of American railroading, John Murray Forbes and Charles Perkins, along with their New England associates, it served a densely populated and fertile agrarian hinterland stretching across Illinois and Iow

Hill genuinely cared about quality rail service and about public opinion.